Finally upgrading HT to Ascend. Duos incoming!

[SunByrne]

Dina said the satin black bamboo are backordered, so it'll be a while yet, but I'm finally giving the old HT the Ascend treatment.

There's really nothing wrong with my current HT speakers: PSB 4T mains, 8C center, and S50 surrounds from around 2001. I think Dave is cut from not the same cloth as Paul Barton, but it's certainly a related fabric. No, it's just time. All the stay-at-home has lead to some serious housecleaning, and has resulted in the sell-off of some old stuff, which means new money for speakers, yay.

So, why Duos? I mean, I've only been talking about getting Towers on this site for how many years now?

The problem is space. My living room has this lovely cut-out in the front wall, recessed around two feet deep, for AV stuff. Nice feature... except it's not much more than six feet wide. This means towers cannot really be spaced far enough apart, since we sit more than six feet away.

It finally occurred to me that the solution is to simply not put the mains in the cut-out. I don't have the floor space for any kind of tower speakers outside the cut-out, but I can get speakers a nice 8 feet apart if I wall-mount them. This means smaller, shallower speakers, not true towers, but I upgraded my sub a couple years ago to a Rythmik L22, which can easily handle that 40-60Hz range I'll be missing by using Duos. Aha!

I will ultimately upgrade the center to a Horizon, but that requires new furniture, and then I might as well gat a new TV (I'm still not 4K yet), and that's all a big crazy expense, so a third Duo for center channel duties for now. (I swear, Dave, if you could have built something like the Horizion but only 8" high, you'd double your sales overnight. Seems like everything is built for 8" center channels.)

So, what am I doing about surrounds? I mean, Lunas would make sense right? They would but... I have, at least according to Dennis Murphy, the last pair of Mini Philharmonitors ever sold (which he let go at a ridiculous price, just to be done with them). They sound a lot like S2s but with much less bass (though more than what the Luna specs suggest). I'm guessing they will match quite well with the Duos. We shall see.

As usual, there will be a review once they finally get here and I have a chance to get them set up and calibrated and time to really listen...

P.S. to Dave: This is going to cause me to move a bunch of other speakers in the house around and I'll have an opening for a pair of S1s, for which I have drivers and crossovers. How much for a pair of S1 cabinets with binding posts and the fluffy stuff?

[davef]

P.S. to Dave: This is going to cause me to move a bunch of other speakers in the house around and I'll have an opening for a pair of S1s, for which I have drivers and crossovers. How much for a pair of S1 cabinets with binding posts and the fluffy stuff?

Please give us a call at the office and speak with Dina. We might have some b-stock cabinets available but she would have to check for you.

Take care!